


What Slumbers in the Woods

by for_space_is_wide



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Claustrophobia, Darkness, Gen, Injury, Insomnia, Night Terrors, Original Character(s), Original Statement (The Magnus Archives), Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-30
Updated: 2021-01-30
Packaged: 2021-03-16 17:35:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29086203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/for_space_is_wide/pseuds/for_space_is_wide
Summary: Case #0140210Statement of Anna Kornet, regarding her time lost in the woods in Flanders, Belgium.[Original statement, could fit somewhere in S1.]
Comments: 2
Kudos: 14





	What Slumbers in the Woods

Case #0140210

Statement of Anna Kornet, regarding her time lost in the woods in Flanders, Belgium. Original statement given October 2nd, 2014. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, head archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

My grandparents – my Oma and Opa – live in Belgium. They’re Dutch citizens, actually, but they live just over the border into Flanders. I think the housing prices were cheaper, so they moved there. It’s only a kilometer to the border – before the euro, they had to keep lots of cash in both guilders and francs because they shopped in both countries, but, it’s much easier for them these days.

But back to why I came here. My statement.

I visited Oma and Opa with my family every summer holiday when I was a kid, but as I’ve gotten older, its turned into a visit every couple of years. I’ve just gotten busier – art camp, internships, you know. We haven’t meant to, and I know my mum especially feels guilty about it – but when you’re not a little kid anymore you just don’t have those sprawling summers where time has no meaning. Well. I used to think time had no meaning during those summers. 

Even when I was a kid, I had trouble sleeping there. At Oma and Opa’s house. It wasn’t very old or creaky, or anything, but something about the stuffiness and the rough stone walls – rough stone in a modern, architecturally interesting way, not like it was a dungeon or anything, it’s actually really beautiful during the day – I couldn’t sleep. I would lie awake, feeling like the darkness was smothering me, and I’d wrap myself in my blankets, but that would only make the weight heavier. And then, every fifteen minutes, the giant clock downstairs would strike, a giant crashing noise that was of course worse on the hours when it would go on and on. Especially midnight.

The stifling dark would get to the point where I just couldn’t take it anymore, and I’d get up, immediately feeling exposed, like something was about to jump me. I’d fumble my way to the door, open the metal handle, and feel my way down the hall to my mum’s room, utterly terrified and out of breath and with all the hair on the back of my neck standing straight up. I’d knock, but the second my mum opened the door, the panic would be gone. I would feel silly for not being able to sleep. And upset because clearly I had annoyed her. 

I’d often wake her up several times in the night like this. Once, I stumbled getting out of bed and knocked a lamp off the night table, shattering the clay base into jagged shards. I was lucky I didn’t cut myself. Another time, I couldn’t get the door of my room open. I was trapped there, rattling the doorknob that wouldn’t click, exposed to the darkness and screaming for help until…my mum opened the door and the panic just…dissipated. 

Now, all of those sound like normal night terrors, I know. Kids can have…overactive imaginations. And they’re not why I’m here, I promise. I did get better at managing it as I got older. I would just…lay there, completely still, willing myself to believe that somehow, my blanket was protection against the dark, even as I was unwilling to move, unwilling to breathe…as if those things would give away my presence somehow. As if the choking dark didn’t already know I was there. But, the morning would always come, and there would be sunlight streaming and my Opa, up before everyone else, making fresh-squeezed orange juice on the juicer.

It always helped if I exerted myself before bed. You know, making sure I was plenty tired so it would be easier to fall asleep. So we often took walks after dinner. Usually we just went around the block, always commenting on the house with the pond for a yard, or the one with the stone lions out front, laughing at how I used to think Te Koop was a realtor’s name because it was on all the signs, when really it just meant for sale. Standard, repetitive family stuff.

But sometimes, we went in the woods. These woods don’t have a name that I’m aware of. They’re are right across the street from Oma and Opa’s house – I gave you the address – there are only houses on one side of their street, with the woods looming opposite. I always used to prefer to play in the backyard – I think I liked having the house between me and those woods. When I was little, Oma would tell me about how long ago, there were wolves in the woods, but they’d been gone for a while. Decades, I think, but somehow I never asked. I know now, because I’ve looked it up, that aside from a few sporadic reintroductions nowhere near Oma and Opa’s house, there haven’t been wolves in the wild in Belgium since the 19th century.

These woods used to be owned by a paper company. They might still be. Sorry for my lack of certainty on this – when you’re a kid, and it’s your grandparents house, and there’s a language barrier, they aren’t the sorts of questions you think to ask. If the company still owns it, they don’t do anything there anymore. Anyway, my point is – the trees are all clearly planted by people. They are in neat, precise rows, each tree exactly the same distance from its neighbours like they’re filling out a giant grid. Straight lines. The effect is eerie, if you’re walking past it, as from any angle you look you can see them in lines, and diagonals, stretching out seemingly endlessly. But which trees are hiding behind another at any point constantly changes with your perspective. It feels like something out of one of those optical illusion books.

It’s not quite perfect, anymore, since the place has been left to its own devices for a while – there are saplings growing up between rows, and there’s denser shrubbery in some areas than others. But the effect is…uncanny. We’d go walking – the paths were also in a grid pattern, straight lines converging at intersections – and I’d stare at the trees, and I couldn’t help but feel like they…or something, was staring back. Like they knew I didn’t belong. Didn’t fit in their pattern.

The day…night…the time that I came here to talk to you about was last summer. 15 July. It was the summer before I was heading to uni, and honestly, I’m at the point now where every time I go on holiday to my grandparents’, I wonder if it’ll be the last time. That sounds cruel. I just mean, Oma and Opa are getting up there in age, you know? So I do my best to spend quality time with them. Since I still can. God though, I’m already – mum keeps talking about trying to go there next summer, and I just feel like I’m going to throw up. I haven’t been able to tell her yet that I’m…not sure I can.

It was after dinner, we’d had…tomato soup, I think, and bread, and I was still a little hungry, but you can’t complain at Oma and Opa’s. Mum always made that clear. The only takers for the after-dinner walk that day were me and my brother, Marcus. He’s three years younger than me, he plays football – we have pretty different interests, but we get on well enough.

Immediately as you step off the roadway and into those woods, I swear everything gets quieter. More muffled, and when you do hear a crack or a scuttle of some animal in the distance, it stands out. I would wheel my head around, looking for the source, but I’d never see it. There were signs of animals everywhere – the paths were dirt, two dirt tracks an axle-width apart and covered in little piles of spherical rabbit poo. But I almost never actually saw any animals there.

Marcus and I decided to go a little off of our usual route – we felt like walking a little further that day. Because the paths all look the same – straight lines, grid intersections – we’d gotten into the habit of counting, to navigate. Three blocks forward, two to the left, three back, and you’ll end up back at the street, stuff like that. But on this evening, we heard something strange. It broke the usual muffled stillness of the woods. It was music – upbeat music, but slightly discordant in a way that made it sound more mournful than it should. We even looked at each other for a second – like, you can hear that too, right? We both could. Neither of us are musical, sorry, so I’m really not sure what sort of instrument – or instruments, it was definitely multiple – it was. And for the life of us, we couldn’t make out what direction it was coming from. It was straining in and out of comprehensibility, tantalising us.

We were heading west, I think, because we thought it was a bit louder that way, when we came across a clearing. Now, there are a few clearings in these woods, but they’re few and far between, and I was pretty sure I hadn’t seen this one before. Not that I’d explored very much, on account of the whole feeling-watched-and-like-I-don’t-belong thing. 

Sat round a fire in this clearing were about a dozen scouts. Preteen boys, maybe between eleven and fourteen years, wearing their sharp blue uniforms. Scouts are pretty ubiquitous around Oma and Opa’s house – my grandparents live out in the country, so in the summer all the scouts come and do their wilderness training and archery and – and whatever scouts do, I was…never a scout. So, finding scouts camping in the woods wasn’t odd.

What was odd was that they all just stared at us as we stumbled into the clearing. All of them – no expressions on their faces, not surprise, not concern, just…blank. Like we had interrupted something. They didn’t say anything. Just sat there and stared, silent. I remember whispering to Marcus that maybe we should ask them for directions, or if they knew what the music was, but he shot that down, and I agreed. I’ve always had this awful guilt and anxiety about how I don’t speak any Dutch, even though it’s my heritage language, so I usually try my hardest to get by without saying much when I’m there. It makes me a lot less assertive than usual, and I was inclined not to have that awkward “actually, we speak English” conversation with the scouts – even aside from how creeped out they made me feel. I waved awkwardly, and we left the clearing. I didn’t turn back until I was sure the clearing was out of sight, because I knew if I did, I’d just see their eyes, still on us.

Soon after that, we realised how well and truly lost we were. We’d completely lost count of the intersections chasing the music – which we could still hear, and which I swear was louder. And worse, the sun was going down – the trees were casting long shadows on the path, and they were starting to merge into that uniform grey that robs the world of its colour as the light fades into night. It was getting cold. I hadn’t thought to bring a jacket. We joked a bit about having to spend the night in the woods.

Marcus got out his phone, even though we both knew it was useless – we didn’t have an international plan, so we couldn’t call anyone or use the GPS unless we were on wi-fi. It was basically just a glorified camera and torch. Eventually, we figured if we just picked a direction – east (the compass app still worked) -- and we stayed in a straight line, we’d have to reach a road. We went on like that for twenty minutes or so as it got darker and darker. All the while, I kept swivelling my head, trying to keep an eye on all directions, trying to spot – I don’t know what, something watching from behind the trees. Every once in a while, I’d think I’d see something, catch a flicker of movement or shadow in the corner of my vision, but it would always be gone when I trained both eyes on the spot I thought it had been. We weren’t joking about spending the night there anymore, not even Marcus, who’s generally a bit less jumpy than I am.

Then, the music swelled. Marcus perked up, turning right at an intersection, saying he was going to run to go check it out because the music had to mean people and we could ask them for help and not repeat the mistake we’d made with the scouts. He told me to wait there – he was a quick runner and he’d be back in a minute, and this would save us the slower walk. I protested, said it was stupid to split up, but he was off – stupid teenagers.

I waited. There was nothing else for it. A minute passed, and he didn’t come back. After five minutes, I was well and truly terrified – there was no sign of my brother, and I was shivering alone in these increasingly foreboding woods.

The human range of vision is only about 120 degrees, you know – and that’s if you have both eyes, and counting your peripheral, which is less reliable. You can only see about a third of what’s around you at any given time. I have never felt more exposed than when I was standing at that intersection. I kept turning around, monitoring all directions, straining my vision to pick out Marcus in the melting grey light – I was fighting my range of vision and the growing darkness both, you see. I got so focused on checking all directions, making sure nothing was sneaking up on me, that I realised I had completely lost track of which path Marcus had taken. Stupid, I know. I should have put something down, a rock or stick or something to mark the path – but they really do all look the same. The twin wheel ruts stretching eternally in parallel, in four directions, at precise right angles.

Then, I saw him – Marcus, down along one of the paths, at the next intersection – but he just ran by, passing me over! Maybe he had gotten even more lost, and missed me. Now, it was my turn to run. I sprinted to the intersection I’d seen him at, calling his name even though every instinct in me was screaming to stay quiet, don’t let them know you don’t belong here. I saw him again, up ahead, still a block away, and kept running. Why didn’t he respond?

This went on for several more blocks – spotting him, losing sight of him, shouting, seeing him again, running after. I grew increasingly frantic – and increasingly out of breath. I’m not exactly an athlete, and certainly not a runner, though I was young enough and had enough adrenaline to keep me going for a bit. I was losing my steam, though, when I followed the blue blur of motion ahead of me in turning left at the next intersection and my foot hooked on something sharp. I tripped, tumbling head over heels at least once from my momentum. I felt a sharp sting on my knee, and my hand came away wet, so I must have cut myself. By this point it was too dark to tell. 

My heart was beating in my chest, and I scrambled to get out my phone to see what I had tripped over. It took my three tries to get my passcode right, and I turned on the torch function. It illuminated…a rock. Only six inches high, but wide and flat, and with reflective flecks marbling the surface. Catching my breath, I reluctantly swung the beam of my torch around in an arc. I did it slowly – I was terrified by this point. Terrified of what I might see. I just wanted to disappear, to wrap myself back in my blanket in my room, and the light gave me away, screamed that a person is here who does not belong, but there I was in the dark gridded woods at night and I had to know what was around me. 

A few feet over was another rock. Much smaller, and darker. Then another one, and another – they formed an arc. Each one was different. The biggest could be called a boulder, and the smallest might have fit in my palm – I almost missed it with the beam and thought the arc had come to an end. But it hadn’t. Eventually I realised it all joined together. I was standing inside a circle of these stones. 

I was trying to find the path again when my light found a person, standing just outside the circle. I screamed, but saw it was one of the scouts. I recognised the blue uniform, and figured with a lurch in my stomach that it had been him I had been running after, not Marcus at all.

I said hello, said ik spreek engels, I speak English, and asked him if he did, too. I think at that point I already knew he wouldn’t give me directions, but I asked anyway. I was desperate. 

He just stared at me, still and unmoving. But this time, he wasn’t expressionless. This time, he was smiling. 

He said something. I have no idea what it was, I have no idea what any of the words meant, I can’t repeat them for you, I’m sorry, but I know it wasn’t Dutch – Flemish – whatever. I may not be able to speak Dutch, but I know what it sounds like. I promise you this was not Dutch. It had a different cadence – it matched the music, the distant music I could still hear, that to this day I still hear in my dreams, that awful music I wish I could just forget.

I was so focused on the strange language that it took me a moment to notice that there were several voices speaking. I whipped the torch round and sure enough, the other scouts were standing around the stone circle, speaking with the first one. They didn’t react, didn’t flinch at all when I hit them with the light – like it couldn’t blind them. They stood at perfect intervals, just like the stones, like the trees. 

But no – there were thirteen stones, and only twelve scouts. There was a gap, and before I could think myself into freezing in place, I ran for that gap. I said before I’m not athletic, and I’m not – but when you’re running for your life, it’s like something else takes over. I ran the fastest I’ve ever run. I was nowhere near any path, now. I nearly tripped on shrubs and I careened around trees that suddenly cropped up my phone light, which was shaking so much as I ran it was almost like a strobe. I cursed myself for turning it on in the first place, because now I couldn’t turn it off – I’d have to stop to let my eyes adjust to the night if I did, and they’d surely catch up to me. Though they were much more graceful runners than I, I heard them, speaking their mysterious language, occasionally snapping a twig, even as mostly I was singularly focused on putting one leg in front of the other. My quads screamed, and I got a stitch in my side so sharp it felt like it’d snap me in two, but the thought of the malice in their smiles, of their hands snatching at my heels kept me going. 

At some point I noticed the trees weren’t in straight lines anymore – I don’t think they had been ever since I left the stone circle. Maybe I’d gone so deep in the woods that it was beyond the area the paper company had owned, and it was truly wild here. There wasn’t any time to think about it, but I noticed because it made not running into things harder.

I dodged between two trees, then my light shone on grass rising up in front of me. I gritted my teeth and lifted my knees high to run up the small hill. My lungs were on fire at this point, and it took a lot out of me, even though it really wasn’t that high a hill.

I crested the top, and saw there was a man at the bottom on the other side. I only barely caught myself from running down, windmilling my arms to get my balance back. I wheezed, and spun round, but there were more just behind me, where I had come. They stopped running and stared, just like the scouts. I was trapped atop the hill.

But these men…they weren’t the scouts. They were older. Their faces were craggier, wrinkled, I think, but it was hard to tell. Some of them had beards. They were wearing ill-fitting, brown or grey clothes that looked like they might have been animal skin – a few definitely had furs. But what was even more frightening was that they were all carrying spears. They looked – they looked like the mannequins of Ice Age hunters at the natural history museum. There’s no other way I can describe them. And…and I know this sounds insane, but I swear…I swear these weren’t costumes. There was something in their eyes – some distance between us, some gulf of aeons, of generations. I just…knew they were real.

There were twelve of them, just like with the scouts, and again, they were just…watching me. They weren’t even holding their spears threateningly, they didn’t look like they were about to attack or anything, but the look in their eyes when they stared at me was one of pride, pride in a successful hunt. I wanted to take their spears and gouge their eyes out, do something, anything to stop them looking at me like that. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t do anything. If I ran, I knew they’d catch me this time. I was completely spent. Bone tired. We must have run miles. And unlike me, they didn’t even look out of breath. 

There was nothing I could do.

Then I heard something that made my heart sink in my chest. The howling, piercing cry of a lone wolf – the only sound besides my breathing.

That was when I felt a pressure, on my foot. I looked down at my trainers, and saw something white clamped over the toe of the left one. 

My breath caught. It was a hand. A skeletal hand. I followed it down past the carpals, to the wrist, which led into the dense brown peat soil.

I remembered something I had forgotten in the chaos of my run.

The landscape in Flanders near my grandparents’ house is completely, utterly flat. A perfect plane. There are no hills anywhere nearby.

This hill wasn’t natural. It was a constructed. A mound.

A burial mound. 

I shrieked, and pulled my foot up, escaping the hand’s grip, feeling the phalange bones strum at my shoelaces as it moved, snatched at me. Then there was a new pressure, a different hand on my other foot, and soon I was hopping like mad, unable to stay still for more than a second without bones springing out of the sinking peat like horrible whack-a-moles. 

The hunters didn’t climb up, didn’t move, just stood guard in a ring around the mound, but they started chanting, in that same strange language the scouts had been speaking. But this time, they weren’t accompanied by the music – the music had stopped at some point. It chills me that I don’t remember when exactly. But whatever they were chanting – I swear it sapped the energy right out of me. Not that I had much left at that point. I tried, I promise I tried to escape the skeletons, but the hands kept shooting up and eventually, inevitably, one of them got a good grip on my calf.

I still remember the dry feeling of it on my skin – I was wearing shorts. Shuddering, scraping, sharp – it dug into my skin and it pulled me down. And…and…I’m sorry. This is horrible to say, but, but it’s the truth.

I let it. I fell to my knees – which stung, from my cut. I…I gave up. I accepted that I was going to die, that this was it. That the skeleton arms would pull me underground, and I would sink into the smothering earth. 

I dropped my phone as I fell, and I didn’t even reach around to try and find it, though my hands were free. The light went out. I don’t know if a skeleton pulled it under, or it ran out of battery, or what. It was gone…and I was enveloped in complete darkness. 

I…lost track of time, after that. I’m sorry, I can’t really explain what happened from then. I remember feeling…warm, covered with peat. The chanting stopped, or I couldn’t hear it anymore – I’m not sure which was the case. My eyes were open, and everything was dark, completely dark, and I tried to stay very still, somehow, as if it would help. I kept expecting to feel pain, from the spears or the skeletons. But it never came. And at some point, at some point I realised I couldn’t actually feel the grips of the hands on me anymore.

I pushed up, and realised the peat would budge – my energy was back, somehow, my adrenaline fired up and I shifted and grunted and wormed my way up, up out of the peat, I threw it off. I was free in the woods again, inhaling the night air, and with my nightvision I ran once more. Still panicked, still highkey, I kept expecting to hear the music or the chanting or something behind me, chasing me. I didn’t – but I kept running anyway.

And then I saw lights, impossibly bright, barrelling at me, and I froze like a goddamn deer. After all of that, I nearly got hit by a car. A car.

The motorists spoke English, and though they were concerned to see someone covered in dirt running out of the woods at night and a bit apprehensive to let me into their clean car, they took pity and drove me to my grandparents’ house. It was sort of embarrassing really – I’d run out right onto Boksweg, just one street over from Oma and Opa’s. The drive took only a minute or two.

When I got home, I learnt it was half midnight. Marcus had made it home two hours before – he’d found the street on his run, then gone back to find me, only, I had been gone. He’d insisted he’d returned to the intersection he’d left me at not two minutes later, but said I’d disappeared. I would have argued that I’d been waiting for five, but…I just didn’t feel like arguing at that point. I was still shocked I was even alive.

None of them believed me. They’d all been frantic with worry, they’d phoned the police, who were also at the house. I told them all the whole story – scouts, hunters, burial mound, all of it. But they didn’t believe it. They told me I’d let my imagination get the better of me, that I’d been scared, gotten lost in the woods at night and run into an animal or something, cut my knee. Lost my phone on the way. They said I’d clearly had a fright, but they said it in that awful patronising way that’s really just asking me to please shut up and go have a lie-down until I start talking sense. 

I didn’t go on any walks for the rest of that visit, except for the day after, after I’d had a good long shower and gotten all the dirt off – I had to find the burial mound in the light of day, with my whole family, to show them. I packed a knife. I made sure everyone had their phones, including Oma and Opa, who actually had signal. Though…somehow I was certain the place wouldn’t be a problem during the day. 

I…couldn’t find it. It was so close to Boksweg, the street I’d ran out onto, but we looked everywhere, tried every forest entry path off Boksweg, and…nothing. Nowhere where the trees weren’t in straight lines. No burial mound.

We did find the stone circle, a bit deeper into the woods. God, the place gave me the creeps, even during the day. There was a sign that said geologische tuin…geologic garden. Apparently some geologists had set this up a few years back. My mum translated the information plaque. The rocks were all from different eras of geologic time, in order from oldest to youngest, billions to millions of years old, going around the circle. It was meant to just be a nice…exhibit, almost. Something to look at whilst walking in the woods. It looked so damn peaceful in the day, I felt a surge of anger at how idyllic it seemed.

I found the rock I tripped on, showed everyone the bloodstain where I had scraped my knee. But all that proved was that I had been there. It didn’t prove anything…supernatural.

So that’s why I’m talking to you. I have to share all of this, and you’re the only ones who might take it seriously, who might…who might do something about it. Help me prove to them that it really happened. That I really did, somehow, get chased by Ice Age hunters in those woods. Possibly that I did...go back. 

I’ve…started having trouble sleeping here, too. I bought a nightlight, but I don’t think it’s bright enough, even though the woman at the DIY shop says it’s the brightest they have. I still feel like I have to hide from the darkness – before it smothers me.

Statement ends.

This would almost seem to be a very clear-cut case of a childhood fear returning with a vengeance in advance of a significant life change – beginning university -- combined with an overactive imagination.

Almost.

The police were indeed called to Piet and Maria van der Linde’s house on the night of July 15th, 2014, and were preparing to search the woods for their missing granddaughter when passing motorists returned Anna home as the statement describes. This “Geologic Garden” is also real – though curiously, the Flemish park authorities claim it was constructed by geologists from the University of Leuven, and Leuven insists it was made by the park authorities. 

The rest of the story is more difficult to verify. I was ready to consider it a dead end and move on when Tim found records of a 2012 archaeological dig at the site of a Stone Age burial mound in Flanders. We had to wait for the translation, but it seems that among the various Stone Age tools and weapons unearthed from the site was a very damaged iPhone 5 – with enough wear and decay from element exposure to have been there for years. The archaeologists have chalked it up to a prank from the local teenagers, but 2012 is the year the iPhone 5 was released, so given the amount of decay this would seem impossible. 

In addition, the 2012 dig site is forty miles from the home of Anna’s grandparents – and as she is clearly no ultramarathon runner, there is no way she could have run there in the space of a few hours. 

We have attempted to contact Ms. Kornet to verify the model of her missing phone, but have been unable to reach her. Even if her phone was an iPhone 5, there is no concrete proof she really did, as she claims, travel back in time. The likeliest culprit here is insomnia, for which some medication might make a world of difference for her.

End recording.


End file.
